Fielding Questions on The Art of Fielding

We spoke with Chad Harbach, the celebrated first-time novelist whose baseball epic is being released this week

In Chad Harbach's debut novel, The Art of Fielding, the tribulations of a star shortstop at a small liberal arts college take on a Herculean feel. A victim of a sudden and inexplicably wayward aim, __Henry Skrimshander must contend with the disappointment of failure even as his team rises to new heights.

Harbach's novel, 10 years in the making, has been receiving advanced praise as one of the best debut novels in years, and gets the kind of huzzahs from publishers and industry insiders normally reserved for work by those heaviest hitters of contemporary fiction, guys like Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace.

Seated at a table in a DUMBO breakfast nook, all glass and stainless steel, Harbach and I ordered a couple of burgers and Five Points and talked about the way things were, the way they're going to be, and how he got to the precipice of fiction fame.

One of the founders and an editor of the literary magazine N+1, Harbach is—like the Westish College Harpooners, the baseball team for the fictitious land grant in The Art of Fielding—an athletic guy, barrel-chested and uncommonly fit, especially given most writers' penchant for bourbon-drinking marathons over actual running ones. Originally from Racine, Wisconsin, about 20 miles from Milwaukee, Harbach's sporting passions have long centered on the Cheesehead triumvirate of Packers, Brewers and Bucks. It was growing up in Racine where Harbach fell in love with baseball.

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GQ: Brewers fan. Bucks fan. Packers fan. Yes?

Chad Harbach: Absolutely.

GQ: Which is your sporting passion?

Chad Harbach: It would have to be the Brewers. When I was five and six years old, in 1981-82, the Brewers made the playoffs. Harvey's Wallbangers. In 1982, they really, really should have won the World Series and had pretty clearly the best team in the league and were up 3 games to 2 in the World Series and lost to the Cardinals. Obviously, I remember all of this quite well. I was six, but ...

GQ: Do you think things have irrevocably changed since those days?

Chad Harbach: I don't think that the guys have changed. In the early 1980s, you have to remember, too, that was a time before big contracts. I remember guys like Ryne Sandberg started getting contracts for like $6 million a year and this was huge news.

I think some of those players from an earlier generation are revered for being more of the "common man," but you are more of a common man if you're making $750,000 a year than you are if you're making, say, $18 million...plus endorsements or whatever else.

GQ: Kind of ends the 'common man' thing, I suppose.

Chad Harbach: You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.

GQ: I often feel there's a temptation for fans to get cynical about the state of things, especially in professional sports. Did you feel any of that cynicism in writing the book?

Chad Harbach: I think that's a whole set of things which I, to a large extent, didn't have to deal with in the book because these are college guys who didn't even have scholarships. So they really are in the category of guys who are just playing for the love of the game.

I wouldn't say that "cynical" is the right word. Because "cynical" seems sort of negative. In fact, there's a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted. As opposed to "cynical" I think it's sort of spot-on to notice that stuff and point it out.

I think it's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal. I've read some articles recently that were very smart. In the NBA, for instance, why do you even need owners of NBA teams? The municipalities pay for the stadiums, and the players play the games, why do you need these rich guys who just complain and then make a 500% return on their investment when they decide to sell the team. What do they even bring to the table?

With my Green Bay Packers, they're municipally owned. And since then, the NFL has put it explicitly in their rules that no other team can be owned like that because it works too well.

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The Wisconsin-bred Harbach is Midwestern to the core, all 'ums' and polite pauses and awkwardness when it comes to self-promotion. So it's no surprise Harbach's nerves jangled when word got around that The Art of Fielding was sold, after a bidding war, to Little, Brown for a sum rumored to be...well, a number most writers would probably kill their aunt for.

With the money comes relief from the stresses of working to write, but it also brings pressure. Harbach is suddenly, through no fault of his own, a bit like those so-called "bonus babies" in the pros, guys who show up with a target on their back with the feeling they have something to prove. He seems hesitant to talk about this, as if sheepish about the advance.

Chad Harbach: Oh, no. I'm not sheepish. I'm just more aware of how people perceive it. It's just an odd situation. There was an article written about me after I sold the book. Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars. There was this article that was written right after the book was sold that put an approximation on my advance in the headline and so it's become this kind of big news. But it's just not something that I feel needs a lot of comment from me. I mean, I'm not going to start saying "Woo!" and making it rain all of a sudden.

GQ: Has your life started to change much as of yet? You're going to get paid to write. That's a writer's dream. How are you feeling about all of this?

Chad Harbach: I feel great. It's wonderful. Before I sold this book I was kind of pretending I had money by spending so much time by working on N+1 and writing when I didn't have any money at all. I was kind of just barely...well, I was actually in a pretty dire financial situation. The point is I was devoting an awful lot of time to the magazine and I didn't actually have the luxury to do that.

I should have been working at a job that paid me money because I did not have any money. So after I sold the book, it wasn't hard to think about how I am going to spend my free time when I'm not working because I had this book to edit and I already had all this work I was doing for the magazine which I don't get paid for but have been doing anyway. But now I can do it without being kind of anxious the whole time. So it has changed my life in that I'm less persistently anxious.

I started this book a really long time ago. I had the idea and started putting together some notes I think it was the end of...2000. So it took me nine years before I had a finished version, and another year of late-stage edits, so 10 years.

I was always thinking about it. I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day. So then I would really get into the mind-space of the book. So I would write a few hours a day, and then all the things I was neglecting to do during that time would eventually kind of catch up with me and so I'd have to set it aside for a couple of months.

For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day, so it would have to be done during these periods when I had time.

I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go. But there's just that few days of frustration to get to that point.

GQ: What was the genesis of the book, the first kernel that got you started? Was it baseball?

Chad Harbach: Well, there are lots of things in the book besides baseball, but the baseball aspect was the first thing that occurred to me. At the center of the book is a shortstop who attends this kind of dilapidated liberal arts school that doesn't have a very strong athletic program, but over the course of his time there he's become this incredibly good shortstop and player. As the book opens, he's on the verge of getting drafted and making a bunch of money. He's on the verge of really realizing his dreams. But just as all this good stuff is about to happen to him he develops what baseball folks have come to know as 'Steve Blass Disease.'

GQ: The 'yips'. Like Chuck Knoblauch.

Chad Harbach: He gets the yips, yeah. So in a sense that was the original germ of the book was a shortstop who gets Steve Blass Disease, a psychosomatic inability to throw the baseball. I just find that incredibly fascinating. At the time there was a spate of guys going through that around the same time. Knoblauch was getting moved from second base to the outfield, Rick Ankiel from the Cards.

And the one I actually saw at a Brewers game that was really disturbing to watch was Mark Wohlers. The year before he had been the best closer in baseball, throwing 100 [miles per hour] and what have you. And this had happened to him and the Braves were trying to bring him back, putting him out there in these sort of innocuous situations to try and build up his confidence and he would come into the game and was just firing them to the screen. And the thing is, it's really painful to watch.

GQ: It's so public.

Chad Harbach: Very public. And here's a guy trying to face down his innermost demons, but he has to do it in front of 40,000 people.

And this game against the Brewers, [Wohlers is] throwing wild pitches and guys are running around the bases and scoring runs and no one is cheering at all. Everyone is just kind of aghast because you can just see how bad it is for this guy. There are a lot of emotions in sports, but very rarely do you see that kind of emotion at that level.

GQ: Pity?

Chad Harbach: Pity, yeah, I think that's a lot of what it is because pity is not supposed to be a part of sports, so it's really got to be a kind of extreme situation for that to enter in.

And the guy is out there all by himself and he has to do this. It's like watching a little kid freeze up in a school play or something. He's just out there, alone, and he just cannot do it.

GQ: Who are your favorite, or most influential, writers? You may as well get used to this question.

Chad Harbach: I know. I've already gotten it a few times. One thing we haven't touched on is that [The Art of Fielding] has a lot to do with Moby Dick in certain ways. Westish College's sports teams are called the Harpooners. And the conceit is that Melville, in his 60s, came and gave a speech at Westish College and they kind of oddly and self-servingly adopted Melville as their school mascot even though it's the Midwest and Melville had nothing to do with the Midwest.

GQ: Obviously Moby Dick had a huge influence on you, then.

Chad Harbach: Huge. It's probably my favorite novel. Just the beauty and power of the language in that book. I think people have the wrong idea of Moby Dick as this somber, boring thing. But in fact it's this very exuberant and funny and big-mouthed kind of book, which was important to me. Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.

GQ: Don DeLillo?

Chad Harbach: Sure. And the other guy who had written amazing fiction work about sports is David Foster Wallace with his tennis scenes in Infinite Jest.

GQ: Do you think sports would play a part in your next work?

Chad Harbach: It's a really good question, a really good question. It's far from the only thing I'm interested in, but I do think that sports is really rich dramatically that, and this is kind of a self-serving thing to say, but I wonder why there aren't more, better sports novels.

My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book.

GQ: Delillo also wrote the long chapter on Bobby Thompson's Shot Heard 'Round the World in Underworld.

Chad Harbach: It's great, yeah. Not as good as End Zone.

GQ: Why a novel about baseball?

Chad Harbach: I think that it is very interesting to write about a team because a team is a group of people who work in very close quarters and have very intense relationships so—in my days of playing sports, I was very rarely on a team that did not have it's own peculiar dynamic, and you wind up having very intense feelings for good and for bad about these people with whom you spend many hours a day. And they might be people that otherwise you would have zero in common with. Instead you're kind of physically touching them three hours a day, you know? So I think that's really rich, and then I'm also just kind of really interested in athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety and people who devote themselves to what they do in a really incredible way.

GQ: Most baseball fans would probably admit to seeing a good double play as poetry, as possessing real grace, almost like a work of art.

Chad Harbach: Absolutely. And the dedication to produce that grace, which is really extraordinary. And like you say that there's a certain poetry in a double play, I'd say taking the U.S., our baseball players work a lot harder than our poets...and our fiction writers, too, not to single out poets. We live in a society that devotes itself to sports in a way it doesn't devote itself to some other arts.

They're not appreciated in anything like the same sort of way. Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.

GQ: A beautiful, wonderful society. I would love to have been popular in high school for the ability to spell.

Chad Harbach: Yeah, man! It's like, "That Josh, he can really spell! I should go make out with him behind the spelling arena!"

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